Category: Questionmark Perception

Enhancing Learning through Technology – Part I

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This is a talk I gave recently to a group of educator/trainers within the U of M Health System. Although it contains many UMHS-specific references, the concepts outlined in it can be applied to other training environments as well. There’s nothing particularly original here, just some suggestions for how to select among different technologies commonly available. This was the first part of a two-part presentation. The second part featured tips for creating engagement and improving digital photography.

 

Best Practice Showcase: Enhancing Learning through Technology

Our team has lots of tools you can use to create online training. There are so many choices, in fact, that it can be difficult to decide which to select when you’re starting a new project.  

To help you sort through all the options, I’m going to give you some typical instructional situations and suggest tools that might best support them, without breaking the budget in the process. These are all things you can use – they don’t require a computer science degree to get a good result!

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Topic not found error on Perception quiz created using QML

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I’ve been working on several custom Questionmark Perception quizzes lately. As sometimes happens, it is not possible to use the Authoring Manager’s Question Editor to create the questions, so I created an example question in the Editor that was as close as possible to the one I wanted, then exported it to QML and modified it to get the custom structure that I wanted. Then I duplicated it and wrote the entire quiz in QML.

When I tried out the quiz created by importing these questions, the quiz came up with no problems, but on trying to submit the answers, it gave a “Topic not found” error.

It turns out that you must have a TOPIC attribute stated in the QML or it will error out. I don’t recall this being the case before, but it definitely is the case now.

RIGHT: 

<QUESTION ID="3084430213002589" DESCRIPTION="01. Question title goes here" TOPIC=topic titlesubtopic title" STATUS="Normal"> 
<ANSWER QTYPE="FIB">

WRONG:

<QUESTION ID="3084430213002589" DESCRIPTION="01. Question title goes here" STATUS="Normal"> 
<ANSWER QTYPE="FIB">
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Mixing Question Types Within a Question in Perception Quizzes

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We had a request to mix fill-in-the-blank type choices with select-a-blank choices within a single question. Questionmark Perception really isn’t set up to do this, so of course I had to see if I could get around it’s limitations. You can add HTML and javascript to a question though, so I thought of this nefarious back-door trick to fool Perception into taking both answers. Unfortunately it still requires accuracy on the part of the user, so perhaps it is not very useful. They must not type spaces, and must type the answer first, then select the units – in order. That’s a lot to ask.

On the other hand, this particular quiz was set up primarily because the users are required to demonstrate absolutely perfect accuracy in this topic, so perhaps it is acceptable in this type of situation. I’ll probably add a javascript that strips spaces, too.

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Internet Explorer 7 blocks cross-domain iframe to parent communication

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A new security setting in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has been causing problems with requests between iframe and parent. There is a security setting in the Internet options called “Navigate sub-frames across different domains”, which in IE6 was set to “Enabled” under Medium security, but is set to “Disabled” in IE7 by default.

An example of the type of communication that is blocked is shown here:

The container page sends a message to Page 1, in Domain A: “Change your location to Page 2”. In IE6, this is not a problem. But in IE 7, it is allowed.

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Perception 4.3 meets an Oracle 10g bug: Unsupported network datatype or representation

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Last January, I installed a test instance of Questionmark’s Perception server, version 4.2, in preparation for upgrading our version 3.4 Perception server. At the time, we were using Oracle version 9i. Once installed, our testing went well, and we did not notice any significant problems.

In July, we finally got around to doing the actual upgrade, and decided to upgrade the database to Oracle 10g at the same time. The installation and conversion of our version 3.4 data went very smoothly. Everything ran well for about a week. Then things began to go wrong. When we would open the Authoring Manager, it would refuse to show us any assessments (“assessments can’t be found”.) Then it would tell us administrators couldn’t be found. After a few days, the assessments disappeared from the Perception Server as well, meaning users could no longer take them. After trying numerous fixes, we reverted to a recent backup of the database from a couple of days before, and the problem disappeared. The one Oracle error that both Perception Server and Authoring Manager were giving was “ORA-03115: unsupported network datatype or representation.”

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Limiting number of tries on Perception Quizzes under SCORM control

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When Questionmark Perception is launched from an LMS using SCORM, Perception’s built-in user management system can’t be used. Perception receives user data from the LMS, and although it stores that data with the results of the quizzes, it can’t use the data for purposes of scheduling and limiting access to quizzes.

Unfortunately, our LMS, SumTotal 6.5, does not have a good way to limit attempts on a learning activity either. There is a rather inflexible option: If you set any learning activity to “allow access upon completion,” after the activity has been completed once, the user will only be able to launch the activity for purposes of browsing, but never take it again for credit. In other words, the user can not enroll again.

This isn’t always the best solution. For example, we wanted to allow two or three tries, depending on the quiz, and we never allow users to browse old quizzes.

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